THE DARK ANGEL began filming on June 15, 1925, at United Studios. By then, the Great War had become a popular subject for films, novels, and plays in America; but they were mostly sentimental treatments. What Price Glory? was one of the first works to break that mold. King Vidor persuaded its author, Laurence Stallings, to write a story for him to direct on screen. The result was The Big Parade. It captured a new sense of realism on film, not only in its treatment of the subject matter but in the level of the acting. The “Great Lover,” John Gilbert, was Vidor’s leading man, and the director “decided that in his new character of down-to-earth doughboy, he would use no makeup and wear an ill-fitting uniform. Dirty fingernails and a sweaty, begrimed face were to take the place of perfectly made-up skin texture.” The film became the biggest-grossing picture of the decade and “skyrocketed John Gilbert to the height of popularity.”
George Fitzmaurice had the same artistic ambitions for The Dark Angel. Working with so sentimental a story, he knew he needed to take a harsher approach than he had previously on his “society pictures.” He invented several haunting touches. One of his scenes depicted bereaved parents searching the depleted ranks of returning troops, only to see ghosts of dead soldiers clad in white uniforms slowly rising. “This effect is corking,” said Variety, “as is the phantom of the Dark Angel, Death, flying over the battlefields and then into the quiet English home of Kitty.”
Enabling Fitzmaurice to capture these effects was the newest recruit to the Goldwyn ranks, a talented cameraman named George S. Barnes. Born in Pasadena in 1893, Barnes attended Glendale High School, then sold automobiles and played violin in a theater orchestra pit before applying for jobs at all the early film studios. Little experience was necessary in 1917, when he began as an assistant at the old Ince company. “George Barnes was one of the first cameramen to be subjective with his instrument,” said King Vidor. “Without gimmicks, he played with lights and shadows and camera positions. He made the audience see things in ways that were never ordinary.” The results—love scenes as well as battle scenes—were everywhere evident in The Dark Angel.
The performances of Goldwyn’s actors were no less remarkable. “As the picture progressed,” the film’s scenarist, Frances Marion, later recounted, “it was fascinating to watch the scenes between Vilma and Ronnie Colman. He spoke his lines in a deep, rich voice and with the authority of an actor schooled in the theatre. Hesitant in speech, struggling to master our difficult language, Vilma responded in a mixture of pidgin English and Hungarian. When we saw them together on the screen we realized how clever Sam had been to sign this lovely blonde girl and to team her with his dark-eyed star.” Vilma had slimmed down for the part, but Goldwyn constantly fretted over her difficulty maintaining her weight. He never knew that she supplemented her “lamb chops and pineapple” diet with jars of homemade goulash, which she snacked on all through the day.
The Dark Angel finished shooting July 30, 1925. Three weeks later, Goldwyn previewed the eight-reel film in Venice, California, a seaside resort built in 1905, complete with bridged canals, an amusement pier, bathhouses, dance halls, and an entire street in the style of the Italian Renaissance. Goldwyn’s supporters turned out that night in full force—Joe Schenck and Norma Talmadge, Hearst and Marion Davies, Elinor Glyn, even Valentino. So stunning was Vilma Banky in her debut that the Sheik himself told Joe Schenck he wanted Miss Banky to be his leading lady in his next picture, The Eagle.
Valentino seemed to have an off-camera interest in his new co-star as well. “You remember I told you that Valentino had picked Vilma as his leading lady,” Goldwyn’s secretary tattled to her friend back in New York. “Well it seems they are going around together quite a bit.” This was a publicity break better than any Goldwyn could have imagined, but he told Miss Banky “that she must not do anything that will in any way ruin her reputation.”
Goldwyn hired a publicity director named Ray Coffin to capitalize on the romantic appeal of his new star. The month before the October 11 opening of The Dark Angel, they promulgated a complete fiction about a baron from Budapest who had proposed marriage to Vilma and wanted her back, especially now that she was consorting with Valentino. The story got such a big play that the Goldwyn organization had to hire a European actor to hold a press conference.Recently I saw reports in the papers that Valentino is separated from his wife [he said). He plays with my darling and is famous for his attractiveness. Is my darling under his spell? Or is Goldwyn bribing her with an immense salary in order to keep her loveliness for his pictures and away from me.... Just think, she has so far forgotten her old country that she actually suggests my joining the Hollywood colony. As if a member of a noble family could possibly become an actor.
Overnight, the Hungarian actress would be installed in the world’s most royal order—movie star.
Ironically, Goldwyn’s publicity ploys were not completely necessary. Vilma Banky’s work spoke for itself. “I HAVE JUST SEEN THE DARK ANGEL AND IT IS ALL YOU PROMISED AND MORE,” wired Louella Parsons, the most powerful member of Hollywood’s fourth estate, soon to supervise all the Sunday motion picture departments of all the Hearst newspapers. “VILMA BANKY WILL PROVE A SENSATION SHE HAS BEAUTY ABILITY AND A PERSONALITY THAT IS DIFFERENT I AM DELIGHTED WITH HER SYMPATHETIC PORTRAYAL OF THE GIRL AND WITH THE CHARACTER SHE HAS CREATED I HAVE ALWAYS HAD A WARM SPOT IN MY HEART FOR RONALD COLMAN AND HE CERTAINLY JUSTIFIES MY FAITH IN HIM.”
The reaction from all quarters was unanimous. The New York Times said: “Vilma Banky is not only a radiant beauty, but also an actress who performs with ease and charm. Her loveliness will be a feature in any screen story in which she appears, as nobody will be surprised at a hero falling victim to her soft pleading eyes.” Richard Halliday assured his two million readers in Liberty magazine that “‘The Dark Angel‘ will disappoint no one. It is one of the most important films. It places on view to advantage Samuel Goldwyn’s commendable new discovery, Vilma Banky.” Theater owner Sid Grauman predicted that Vilma Banky would become “a great star.” Elinor Glyn said she “has ’IT!‘”
Vilma Banky was soon receiving two thousand fan letters a month. Without his next script for her completed, Goldwyn happily loaned her again to play Valentino’s flame, in The Son of the Sheik. Goldwyn ripped up his original contract with Vilma Banky and paid her one thousand dollars a week. Frances Marion got a big raise too, Goldwyn’s way of enticing her into writing the next Potash and Perlmutter comedy, Partners Again—in which the hapless twosome took on the automobile industry.
Goldwyn closed out his deal with First National in a blaze of glory, but that was a flicker alongside his first drama for United Artists. From the moment he had heard the story of Stella Dallas, Goldwyn believed it was bound to be his greatest motion picture to date. “The episodic plot moves forward through a series of strained coincidences, misunderstandings, overheard conversations,” noted film historian Richard Griffith. But Sam Goldwyn—his own life in conflict over a daughter and divorce—had been obsessed with the story, even though he did not have the $15,000 on hand to afford it. He persuaded his attorney to put up the cash on his behalf and hold the rights as collateral.
“Everyone was surprised that Sam chose a simple story like ‘Stella Dallas’ at a time when the public seemed to be clamoring for spectacles or lurid melodrama,” recalled Frances Marion. “The audiences had just shuddered through another grotesque performance of Lon Chaney in ’The Phantom of The Opera.‘ They were also attracted to the most overanimated young leading man ever seen on the screen, John Gilbert. Obviously he was a rival as well as a marked contrast to Ronald Colman.” Goldwyn got Henry King to direct Stella Dallas for $75,000 and 25 percent of the profits.
“It’s a beautiful woman’s story,” Goldwyn told Frances Marion as she broke ground on the scenario. “I’m starring Ronald Colman in it.” She knew he meant to exploit the marquee value of his popular male star now, even though his part would be but a featured role; but she could not resist saying, “As a fema
le impersonator.” Goldwyn and King practically came to that necessity. For all the strength of the title role, Henry King recalled, “we couldn’t give the part away ... except to actresses Sam didn’t want.”
While almost seventy-five screen tests were made and rejected, a thirty-four-year-old actress named Belle Bennett—who had played small roles in two earlier Goldwyn pictures—began lobbying for the part. “I want ‘Stella Dallas’ more than any thing in this world, just now,” she handwrote Sam Goldwyn. “You know (as well as all directors and producers know) that I can play it also can make up for any part from fourteen to eighty. ”After a number of Broadway actresses—from Laurette Taylor to Estelle Winwood—turned him down, Goldwyn let Miss Bennett audition. Her test literally moved him to tears.
On his last trip to Paris, Sam Goldwyn had seen a seventeen-year-old American-born actress named Lois Moran. Her dewy beauty—which would inspire F. Scott Fitzgerald to create Rosemary Hoyt in Tender Is the Night—made her ideal for the pivotal role of Stella’s daughter. Jean Hersholt, as the boor Stella married on the rebound, and Alice Joyce, as Stephen Dallas’s socialite second wife, filled out the rest of the cast, alongside eighteen-year-old Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., in one of his first roles. Director King instructed young Fairbanks to grow a mustache. The day the actor’s father learned that it was for his role in the picture, he rang King on the telephone. “Henry,” said that year’s “Son of Zorro,” “remember that I’m still in pictures. Don’t make Junior look too old.” King assured the forty-two-year-old star—who no longer stripped quite to the waist in his pictures—that the mustache would only make the boy look younger, a callow touch.
“This was going to be Goldwyn’s masterpiece,” recalled Henry King. “That’s what he kept telling Frances Marion and me. And he put his money where his mouth was. Everything was first cabin on that picture.” Miss Marion concurred: “If a player proved inadequate for the role, he permitted Henry King to throw out every foot of film already shot and retake the scenes. Because of this urge for perfection, which often piled cost upon costs, his bankers grew anxious.” The shooting schedule stretched to a lavish nine weeks. When the budget went beyond Goldwyn’s $350,000 credit line, he appealed to Dr. Giannini himself. Moved by the producer’s enthusiasm as much as for the project itself, Giannini chipped in the necessary funds from his own pocket—for 10 percent of the film’s profits and the promise that Goldwyn would not borrow any more money for one year.
Henry King directed Stella Dallas in an understated manner, telling his story mostly in medium shots, cutting to close-ups for punctuation. “In those days we had faith in our material, faith in our actors, and faith in our audiences,” he said. “We didn’t feel we had to cut back and forth sixty times a minute to hold the viewer’s eye. The secret of the silent camera—and I think this holds just as true for motion pictures with sound—is restraint. Human emotion can be the most exciting action there is.”
The most convincing illustration of King’s words occurs in the birthday sequence of Stella Dallas: Stella and Laurel wait in vain for Laurel’s class-mates to arrive at her party, unaware that all the schoolchildren have been told not to show up. Laurel dams up her feelings as she realizes there will be no guests. The camera holds on her as she takes a spoonful of ice cream. Not until her first taste do tears stream down her face.
No matter how many times he saw that scene, Sam Goldwyn never failed to burst into tears himself. While Stella Dallas was being assembled, he showed the scene to Ernst Lubitsch. The German director praised Henry King’s work but “questioned the wisdom of spotting so intense a scene in the first half of the picture.” He wondered how it could be topped. Goldwyn merely grinned and ordered the projectionist to run the finale of the picture, the beautifully composed sequence of Stella Dallas in the rain, staring into the living room of the Dallas home on Fifth Avenue as her daughter and young Richard Grosvenor (Fairbanks junior) take their wedding vows.
The whole of a motion picture does not always equal the sum of its parts. On Sunday the fifth of September, less than two weeks after shooting was completed, the filmmakers ran the rough cut of Stella Dallas. When the lights came up, they all looked at each other in disappointment. Henry King walked out of the projection room, dejected. Goldwyn’s secretary was practically in tears because the picture looked like such a “flop.”
Stella Dallas had slipped from pathos into bathos. Each scene ran too long and there was not enough relief between the heavy emotional moments. Fortunately, Goldwyn had a top editor under contract, Stuart Heisler, who had been in the business since 1914. King reminded himself that the themes of the story were so basic, “they didn’t need circles drawn around them.”
He and Heisler worked around the clock for two weeks, knowing that Goldwyn was leaving soon for New York to arrange for the exhibition of the picture. On the morning of Saturday the nineteenth, aware that Goldwyn and his wife and the Lehrs were expecting to screen the final edited version in just a few hours, King went home to his cottage at the Ambassador Hotel and fell into bed. He was awakened by the telephone: Goldwyn insisted that he would not run the film without King there. The director said he had not had more than a few hours’ sleep in the last fortnight. Goldwyn said he would start the film, but he expected King to be there when it finished. King was just making his way to the projection room when Goldwyn swung the door open. He was shaking, and his face was white. “Henry,” he called out, “you’ve ruined me, ruined me!” King asked what he meant. “Look at Mrs. Lehr over there,” he said. “Look at Frances. They can’t talk either.” Goldwyn himself started to cry. “We’ll talk about it Monday,” he said, walking with his wife to his car. “Henry,” he shouted in leaving. “Go home and get some sleep. You look terrible!”
After a few more days of fine-tuning and last-minute title writing, Goldwyn previewed the film in San Bernardino, and Pasadena. The audiences’ reactions convinced him that almost two thirds of the title cards and two complete scenes would have to be thrown out. By the end of September, Goldwyn stood confidently behind Stella Dallas.
The head of his new distribution company lacked his enthusiasm. Joe Schenck thought Stella Dallas was “a great woman’s picture,” but he did not believe it would have the universal appeal necessary for it to play at a big legitimate theater for two dollars a ticket. He suggested that Goldwyn release the picture in as many theaters as would book it and spend twenty thousand dollars in advertising. Goldwyn trusted his own instincts and booked George White’s Apollo Theater on Forty-second Street for three shows daily. His former partner from the Capitol Theater, Samuel Rothafel—who had broken ground on his great monument to motion picture exhibition, the Roxy—staged the premiere.
By October, most of Hollywood’s elite had seen the film at special previews or in private screening rooms. The reaction to Stella Dallas was unprecedented. Ethel Barrymore wrote Goldwyn that it was “the best moving picture I have ever seen. Best in its direction, acting, restraint, taste and appeal.” Elinor Glyn pronounced it “wonderful,” assuring Goldwyn that it “will wring every mother’s heart!” As Goldwyn had suspected, men fell even harder for it: “Few things have affected me as much in my life as did ‘Stella Dallas,”’ wrote Douglas Fairbanks. “A FRIEND OF MINE WHO HAS SEEN THE PICTURE THREE TIMES ENJOYED IT AS MUCH LAST NIGHT AS I DID MYSELF SEEING IT FOR THE FIRST TIME,” wired Chaplin. “Stella Dallas ... is, in my opinion, one of the few great screen achievements,” declared Cecil B. DeMille. “You have literally taken a slice of life and transferred it to the screen in a highly entertaining, and at the same time artistic manner,” wrote Harold Lloyd. Goldwyn worked the celebrities’ tributes into various forms of advertising.
The most important reaction to Stella Dallas came at the final preview in Los Angeles. The following noon, William Randolph Hearst appeared at the studio, only to be told that Goldwyn was at lunch. Hearst had grown fond of the Goldwyns—inviting them on his yacht and to “the ranch” for weekends—so he lingered around the
office. When he returned, Hearst gave Goldwyn an unsealed note addressed to Arthur Brisbane, editorial writer and publisher of the New York Mirror, which he suggested Goldwyn deliver in person. In it, he urged Brisbane to ask Louella Parsons “to do all she can for the picture”; and he made it clear that he wanted his most influential newspapers to discuss Stella Dallas “helpfully.” Brisbane wrote about Stella Dallas for weeks.
The film’s top-billed star, however, had been getting short shrift, and he resented it. Despite Ronald Colman’s strong appearances in both of Goldwyn’s latest hits, Belle Bennett, Lois Moran, and Vilma Banky were receiving all the attention. Without a film ready for the handsome $2,000-a-week leading man, Goldwyn loaned him out, netting three times what he was paying him. One of the ironclad conditions for borrowing the actor was the agreement to advertise “Ronald Colman through courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn.”
His first loanout was Ernst Lubitsch’s adaptation of Lady Windermere’s Fan at Warner Brothers. Photoplay reported that the director never failed to get in a dig at the man holding the actor’s contract. “Mr. Colman,” he would instruct the actor, “you walk across the room, you stop by the table, you pick up the book, then you look into the eyes of Miss McAvoy by courtesy of Sam Goldwyn!” Colman next played opposite Norma Talmadge in Kiki, one of the most popular films of the decade. The title role in Jesse Lasky’s Beau Geste followed. It, too, became a smash hit. Even though outside employers were making better use of the actor than Goldwyn had, within the first two years of his contract Ronald Colman had risen from bit player to one of Hollywood’s most popular leading men. He received close to five thousand fan letters every month—reputedly more than any actor except John Gilbert.
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